President Obama’s smoking problem in Malaysia

Malaysia’s government is battling a smoking epidemic that threatens its young people — and it fears Barack Obama’s big Pacific trade deal will make the health crisis even worse.

When the president, a reformed smoker himself, landed in Kuala Lumpur this past weekend for his third stop in a weeklong Asia swing, he visited one of the other 12 Pacific Rim countries hoping to close the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement that American and Asian businesses value at billions of dollars in sales into new markets.

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Following Obama’s meeting with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, the two leaders addressed a room full of reporters, but it’s not clear whether any progress was made on the trade deal. Najib said Obama “fully understands our domestic sensitivities, and we will sit down and try to iron this out with the intention of trying to work out a deal in the near future.”

However, one thing neither leader talked specifically about during the media event was a brewing tension surrounding the negotiations: the way Malaysia’s health officials fear the deal might sabotage their country’s efforts to fight its smoking problem.

Malaysia worries that it will suffer the fate that Uruguay, Australia and Thailand did in other trade deals: dragged into an expensive, yearslong international legal fight over its right to block cigarette companies from advertising.

When Malaysia’s trade negotiators have pushed a carve-out for tobacco in a section of the deal that would otherwise allow businesses to challenge whether a country’s laws and regulations meet its international trade obligations before an independent panel, the United States has balked and instead called for an approach that Malaysian officials think would leave their country exposed.

“The U.S. government’s proposal on tobacco does not go far enough. It is insufficient to protect the government’s sovereignty to do their utmost to protect public health,” said Mary Assunta, a senior policy adviser for the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance. “Tobacco companies should not interfere with this, nor challenge governments using the free-trade platform.”

Smoking is a raging health problem in the Southeast Asian country of 30 million. Sixty percent of its 21-to-30-year-old population smokes, and nearly half the country’s men average more than 11 cigarettes per day — all of which is running up a $900 million annual health care tab for smoking-related illnesses.

Obama’s visit to the country gave anti-smoking groups a chance to raise visibility around the issue and solicit help from the U.S. president.

“Today, 80 percent of the world’s smokers reside in the developing world, where the tobacco industry is focusing their business, using any excuse including free-trade agreements to challenge legitimate government efforts to reduce tobacco use,” Molly Cheah, head of the influential Malaysian Council for Tobacco Control, wrote in an open letter to Obama.

Cheah urged Obama to make his visit “more significant” than the last time a U.S. president stopped in Malaysia — Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1966 — and “leave behind a legacy in tobacco control for the world.”

The dust-up over tobacco has also drawn broader attention from public health advocates and U.S. lawmakers who say it’s a crystal-clear example of why the trade deal should not give businesses the right to challenge countries’ laws at all. It ranks among the top complaints of Democrats whose opposition already has halted Obama’s trade agenda from advancing in Congress this year.

“All Americans should be concerned with ‘investor-state’ provisions in TPP that allow foreign corporations to mount trade challenges that weaken or dismantle public health or consumer-protection laws,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said. “Nowhere is this threat clearer than with Big Tobacco and anti-smoking efforts, which is why TPP must explicitly prohibit trade challenges to anti-tobacco laws.”